I spent two and a half hours at the SFO Noise Abatement Office as a follow-up to the questions I asked at the last Court session about noise data. My host, David Ong, was very helpful– cordial, informative and curious to hear about my concerns. One couldn't ask for more at this point in the proceedings. We discussed the arrival and departure routes at length, using their system to graph sets of data for specific dates and windows of time including my least favorite-12 am to 4 am. It turns out that late night departures are not predominantly Asian flights or cargo, but often head to Chicago, Detroit, etc to make early morning connections. We reviewed the timing around the Runway Safety project that added a new runway surface at the ends of the north-south runways and noted when they reopened August 10, 2014 as you can see from the graph below with the green V-shaped departures reappearing on 1L and 1R. One theory is after a summer without traffic on those runways the reopening may have sounded louder to residents. I can't really agree with as a cause of our distress now simply because it was five years ago, but I'm sure it had some short-term effect in 2014.
We also discussed how the international terminal Gate G which has a lot of Boeing 777 "heavy" traffic is situated such that engine-start-up is pointed towards B'game. If it is determined that 777 start-up is a notable cause of noise, there might be other locations that would work. I was particularly interested in the noise we experienced on Mother's Day this year. It was quite bad in my yard, but the peak noise measurements at the two North B'game monitoring stations didn't really show what I know I heard. SFO has awarded a contract to replace the 15 year old noise monitors with new technology and one can only hope that 15 years of technical advancement brings as much improvement in microphones as it has in other products. I will be getting a short-term noise monitor installed in my yard in July with better noise correlation that is done by a person using the actual recordings as opposed to the system algorithm and NOAA radar data about take-offs. It should be interesting although I am under no illusion that it will fix anything other than my curiosity.
Mr. Ong puts a lot of hope on the Airport Roundtable's ground noise subcommittee being able to isolate the main cause(s) of the runway noise so that something innovative can be done to mitigate it. I hate to conclude with "we shall see", but that is where we're at.
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